Ventura May Hike Keys’ Fee to $2,000 : Dredging: Residents would pay $300 more per year for city cleanup of backyard canals. But lawsuit settlement could make issue moot.

The city of Ventura is proposing to increase the assessment for the long-embattled Ventura Keys, charging owners of the luxurious, waterfront homes about $2,000 per year to dredge their back-yard canals.

On Monday, the City Council will take the first step in approving the $300 increase by deciding whether to OK an engineer’s report recommending the higher taxes.

However, with the settlement possible this summer of a lawsuit brought by Keys homeowners, some residents call the proposed higher assessment mere housekeeping.

Under terms of the settlement, stemming from a lawsuit filed by nearly a third of the 300 homeowners in the assessment district, Keys residents would each pay $685 for last year and $749 for this year’s dredging assessments, with an increase of no more than $64 per year after that.

The proposed assessment hike “is just a part of the old process that we will supersede when the new agreement gets put in place,” said Jim Clark, co-chairman of Save-the-Keys, a neighborhood coalition active in the settlement negotiations.

Most of the homeowners in the assessment district have said they will go along with the settlement. However, 49 residents have not responded to the offer, and 11 have refused it.

Don Adams, a local attorney with a lawsuit of his own lodged against the city, is one of those 11. Adams said his lawsuit would push the city not just to lower assessments on homeowners, but to clean up the barranca that he alleges is causing the problem.

The proposed increase “is outrageous,” he said. “The number they are picking is artificially high, to induce those who haven’t settled to settle now.”

City officials scoffed at Adams’ analysis. “Well, of course not,” City Councilman Gary Tuttle said. “I don’t think the cost of dredging is ever going to go down.”

Specifically, the engineer’s report states the fees should go up to pay for repairs to the walls of the channels, future dredging costs, and the possible installation of a plastic liner at the site where the city dumps the silt.

A majority of City Council members said Friday they would probably approve the engineer’s report as a preliminary step to holding two public hearings in June on the assessment increase.

“I hope this one’s going to be somewhat less contentious than the others we’ve had,” said Mayor Tom Buford, adding he hopes to see the issue resolved soon.

The city and homeowners have locked horns over who should shoulder the cost of cleaning up the canals since the late 1980s, when silt deposits in the channels grew so high that boats had trouble navigating the narrow corridors.

Homeowners contend the city should pay for dredging because it is other city residents’ dirt and debris that washes down the Arundell Barranca and into the semi-private Keys channels.

However, city engineers have long maintained that Keys residents are bound to pay for dredging by a 1964 agreement that developer John Klugh signed, establishing the Porto Bello Assessment District to maintain the channels.

The district, which levied assessments based on home value, operated from 1964 to 1978, when it was disbanded following passage of Proposition 13. The city re-established the district in 1991 over the vociferous objections of Keys homeowners, this time levying the same assessment on each property in the district.